


Bury Your Friends

by Cards_Slash



Series: Second Verse [8]
Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Wyatt "limp tiny dick" Earp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:35:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23219344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: The day after is always bad, but not even Doc could have predicted this one would get quite this bad.
Relationships: Doc Holliday/Bobo Del Rey | Robert Svane
Series: Second Verse [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632727
Kudos: 13





	Bury Your Friends

While an agreement to meet for coffee implied that said meeting would occur at some point in the _morning_ , Doc had not fallen asleep until well into what could be considered the morning. As such, he was not in the mood to be _awake_ again before the sun had settled on the opposite side of the day. In his startled, unwilling state of consciousness, he must have gotten his hand on one of his guns with the intent to shoot it at whatever was banging on the tin can’s pressed-wood-door because Bobo’s hand folded over his to push his arm down.

“Stop shooting the good ones,” Bobo grumbled. He was clinging to the edge of the paper-thin mattress, rolled on his side so he was facing Doc. There wasn’t enough space for his legs because Doc had taken it all up with his own body, so Bobo’s knee was pressing against his thigh. If Doc was _displeased_ to be awake, the way Bobo rubbed his eyes seemed to indicate a refined _rage_. “What?” he shouted at the door.

“It’s the sheriff’s office!” To his credit, David (at least that was what Doc thought his name was) had the sound of a man who drew the short straw. He did not _want_ to be interrupting a fine morning full of sleeping. “He said if you didn’t talk to him on the phone he’d have to bring a SWAT team to the park.”

Bobo growled with his face pushed into a pillow. When he moved, every motion was full of jerks and kicks, all but throwing himself to his feet. He mumbled, “Nedley doesn’t have the balls,” as he ducked low enough to shove the door open. “Give me the fucking phone,” he said. 

What an impressive sight he was, pink-sleep-lines on his bare arms, no shirt, wearing nothing but a pair of sweats that couldn’t be counted as red or orange but an unfortunate dull color between the two. He jerked the phone out of the hand of the man offering it up and yanked the door closed again. “Can I help you?” he snarled into the phone. Whatever was being said to him must have been just short of the stupidest thing he’d ever heard, because his head fell forward and his eyes squeezed shut and his shoulders got all hunched up like hackles on a dog. “The _deputy_ was there. What could I possibly _add_ to the report?”

Doc rolled onto his back since they did not appear to be going back to sleep. The mattress crunched when he moved in a way that was not at all comforting. There was a pile of debris pushed between the roll of the blankets and the wall, he dug through it for something that qualified as worthy enough to smoke. He found a dozen empty packs of cigarettes, a lighter, a pair of panties and old candy wrappers but he did not find anything to smoke. 

“Fine,” Bobo said across the tin can. He didn’t crush the phone but dropped it on the crowded counter by the door. He was perfectly pissy when he said, “can you walk now?”

He could _walk_ the night before. It was just more unpleasant than usual on account of the aching muscle in his thigh. He had even proven he could walk, because a man that could _not_ walk could not have pulled the semi-dead body of Chester the last of the idiots who attacked the bar across the border of the triangle. While that had been an unpleasant exercise, he had managed it thus proving that he was more than capable of walking _despite_ the injury. 

“I did acquire this injury with your assistance,” he said. 

Bobo rolled his eyes, “you promised Wynonna doughnuts.”

Well, that had only seemed like a good idea the night before. You should always show up to tense situations with gifts. It did wonders to make people forget that they were all set to dislike you on sight. Doc pulled himself to the edge of the bed and pressed the heel of his hand against the long muscle of his leg that hurt the worse. “She will appreciate them, I am sure.” And, “I need a shirt.”

Bobo just sighed.

\--

The closer they got to the homestead the stronger that feeling of being _unwanted_ got. It was as real a sensation as being held back at arm’s length; like a growing awareness that you were running out of space to move. Walking toward that invisible edge was like voluntarily walking into a wall, and maybe Wynonna had some idea about how _unpleasant_ that buzz of energy pushing back against him was or maybe it hadn’t even occurred to her. What _had_ occurred to her was how safe she was on the opposite side of the fence.

Wynonna didn’t look any more awake than Henry, but she was leaning against the fence with the promised cups of coffee. She didn’t hand them across the barrier, but Henry gave her the doughnuts and took the two cups to pass one to him. 

Bobo did not actually drink coffee, but he appreciated the pretense.

Henry took a drink like a man having an orgasm. (Just not like Henry having an orgasm. Perhaps a man who wasn’t so shameless about it. Or a man having a very mediocre orgasm.) He helped himself to a glazed doughnut with a raised eyebrow and a head tilt like he was asking if Bobo wanted one. 

“So,” Wynonna said after she’d shoved half a sprinkled doughnut into her mouth, “where should we start?”

That could not be an actual question, not even to Wynonna Earp. “You ask me what you want to know, if I feel like telling you what _I_ know, I will.” 

Wynonna was so busy glaring at him that she didn’t even pay attention to how casually Henry was leaning up against the fence, how his arm had fallen across the other side. How he leaned his head to stare at her back pockets and then stretched out his arm to pull the folded-over envelope loose. She didn’t even notice he had it until he was handing it to Bobo. “That was _mine_ ,” Wynonna said.

“An honest conversation cannot be had when all parties are not on even ground,” Henry said. “If we expect Bobo’s full cooperation in our efforts to bring an end to this curse and avenge your sister, then we will need to treat him with the respect we afford all of our allies.”

“He’s not our ally,” Wynonna hissed at him. “He’s your…” she stumbled over the word _boyfriend_ perhaps, and went straight to, “fuck buddy.” She turned her attention back to Bobo. “So, Wyatt wrote you a letter to say he was sorry. Why?”

“Fuck buddy,” Henry repeated with a curl of distaste on his lips.

The coffee he was holding smelled like a handful of beans burned to the bottom of a pot. The liquid was _boiling_ hot through the skinny metal cup in a way that had to be tolerable if you had any intention of consuming it. “As I remember it, he mentioned his reason in the letter.”

“An error in judgment,” Wynonna said. “That could mean anything. Maybe he...cheated at cards.”

Wyatt might have been capable of a lot of things, but he considered himself too _honest_ to go off cheating at cards. Now, _Henry_ was a man that knew how to make advantages appear out of thin air but he might not have liked calling it _cheating_. Bobo tipped the cup of black sludge so it poured out and set the empty cup upside down on the fence between them. He couldn’t get any closer, so he ducked his head like they were telling secrets. “In my day? A man didn’t waste time writing a letter if he didn’t have something _worthwhile_ to apologize for.”

Wynonna was facing him but she flicked her eyes to the side, to look at Doc and then back at him. “Fair enough,” she said with sprinkles clinging to the corners of her mouth. “Why did you need Willa alive?”

“I _needed_ Ward,” Bobo said. But that had not turned out as expected, because some men thought they were better at thinking than others. The seven hadn’t needed to lay a hand on Willa but they just couldn’t _help_ themselves. “I was told that if the heir willingly crossed the border with me while carrying Peacemaker it would break the curse.”

“Did the witch tell you that?” Wynonna asked. 

Yes she had. “Ward came _to me_ with the deal. Once he died,” because Wynonna shot him, “the only chance I had at breaking the curse was Willa. As you can imagine, it was not a popular idea to keep her alive so I took her and told them she died.”

“You took her?” Wynonna was starting to get a look like she regretted meeting under the notion of a truce. Her hand was sinking lower at her side, itching to lay across Peacemaker to remind herself she could always shoot him. “What were you going to do with her?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said (but it did. It mattered very much to Wynonna). “I didn’t get the chance to figure out what to do with her. The witch took her as soon as I saved her. Constance said she’d give her back when I finished digging up her demon sons.”

“And I’m just supposed to believe you?” Wynonna asked. “I’m just supposed to take your word that you never meant for anyone to die? That you _saved_ my sister? That she _happened_ to end up dead after she was kidnapped from our home? That you didn’t _intend_ for anyone to die when you tricked Waverly into burying the talisman in the garden?”

Ward had been the one to set the rules; he’d been looking for a way out and the pretense of innocence. The weakest of a line of men who hadn’t asked to be saddled with the mess Wyatt hadn’t thought of as important enough to clean up. It wasn’t Ward’s fault if he got dragged out of his house. He wasn’t a failure if it looked like he was _forced_ to do it. That bit about it being a willing act was something nobody ever needed to know as far as Ward was concerned. 

Bobo sighed, “I’ve been stuck _here_ since Wyatt died. I’ve watched all the Earp heirs. If I wanted any of you dead, I wouldn’t wait until you were old enough to hold the damn gun, would I?”

Maybe pointing out how unsafe Wynonna really was did not help make him appear trustworthy but the first step in establishing a worthwhile partnership was telling the truth. Truth was, the revenants outnumbered the heir and Wyatt’s gun could only hold so many bullets at once. Truth was, they didn’t have to come after him in a series of fist fights and vague threats. She was up against dozens of outlaws that had done everything from horse theiving to murder and they were behaving out of character by leaving her alone. 

Wynonna sighed, “so now what? You help me hunt the revenants you don’t like? I just ignore the ones that are on your good side?”

Henry took a drink of his coffee with such an obnoxious slurp that he couldn’t be ignored. As soon as he had everyone looking at him, he acted like he hadn’t done a damn thing. 

“I want out,” Bobo said. Because that was the only thing he had wanted since he was still known as Robert Svane. The thing that had brought him to the edge of a well with a long-long string and the fleeting hope that maybe he could spare himself. The man that Henry had been would not have given up his life-saving ring but that wasn’t why Robert left him there. “Most of us,” he said, “want _out_.”

“Right,” Wynonna said. She’d reached the end of what she was willing to listen to. “I’ve got to get to work. I’m sure Dolls is wondering where I am.” Wynonna shifted on her feet so she was looking at Henry pretending not to be listening. “You need to come by. We have some plans to catch you up on.”

“I was under the impression that I was already privy to all of Black Badge’s present plans,” Henry said.

“Yeah,” Wynonna said, “the wrong impression.” She grabbed the doughnuts off the fence with more force than the cardboard could take. It caved around her fists as she took a step back. “Just come by.”

\--

The old truck was the sort of beast that couldn’t do _anything_ without complaining about it. As tired as he was, Doc could sympathize with anything that felt like the best way to get through doing things was to scream about them. Even when they parked outside the bar, the engine of the beast had squealed in outrage before it shuddered a stop. It ticked and cracked as it settled in the cold. 

The noise had caught the attention of the revenants securing sheets of plastic to the gaping hole in the bar. From the inside, it had been a goddamn disaster, but from the outside it looked like a nightmare. The wood had splintered and split from the assault of bullets being fired into it. The grenade had exploded with a blackening flash, leaving the imprint of a sudden flame up the outside wall. The upstairs window was already covered in plastic but it did nothing at all to cover the fresh-grated look of the wall on the outside. 

Sitting on the outside of it, hours later, it was a _sobering_ sight to behold. It made their survival seem even more like a miracle. But the aftermath of those sorts of things always seemed to feel that way. You could not stand in the dusty quiet of a finished firefight and not feel the smallness of your own mortality. 

Bobo was not looking at the damage. He had not even pulled the keys from the ignition. No, he was just sitting there making a rolling sound in his throat, turning the age-yellowed envelope over in his hand. “I didn’t ask him to apologize,” was a confession that Bobo didn’t seem like he wanted to be making. “I would have been happier if he hadn’t.”

“Wyatt did like to make himself feel better,” Doc said, “it did not seem to matter to him how it made other people feel.”

Bobo growled and crushed the envelope in his fist. He yanked the keys out of the ignition as he kicked the door so it went screaming open. “Get your coat. Go find out what _Wynonna_ wants.” 

A man could get whiplash when faced with mood swings like that. Doc followed Bobo around to the front, through the door that had been knocked off its hinges and into the dust-filled inside of the bar. It looked like a proper crime scene, filled up with bullet holes and sawdust and puddles of blood half-burnt into the wood from the hellfire that had eaten the bodies. 

Hui was standing behind the bar shaking his head as he tossed broken bottles into a trash can large enough to hide a body in. The revenant that he had shot in the balls (Howard? It could have been Howard) a few days ago was standing in the middle of the room with a clipboard scratching down every bit of damage he came across. It was hard to know where to _start_ as far as the damage went.

Bobo threw his coat over then of the surviving barstools and waved his hand at Hui’s complaints about the waste of liquor. “Just do the inventory,” he said and as he crossed the room to the round man writing down expenses, “Howard.”

“It’s not great,” Howard said. He flipped the top sheet of his paper so the pair of them were ducked-heads-and-looking at the second sheet. 

Dowdy appeared from the back with a broom, saying something very much like: “someone has to sweep. It might as well be you, Dudley. Everyone else knows a _trade_. I can do more than sweep.”

As much as he would have liked to stay and fully _appreciate_ the sight of a bar full of laboring revenants, he was only here for his coat. It had been left stuffed onto a shelf behind the bar the night before. “Excuse me,” he said across the bar.

Hui (who seemed to be taking the loss of alcohol _very_ personally) didn’t even give him a chance to ask the question before he pulled Doc’s coat out and dropped it on the bar. That was all the time he had to spare for men that weren’t _helping_ , apparently. He said something low and _mean_ and not in any language that Doc understood.

Dowdy understood him, because his boring face cracked into a slithery smile and he was half-laughing when he said, “well that’s just one of the perks of being Bobo’s wh...usband.” The last half of that word had changed in milliseconds, like the man could feel how the attention of the bar shifted to rest on him. He didn’t even look up to confirm he was being watched but discovered a deep, abiding love for vigorously sweeping up broken glass and bullets.

Doc couldn’t stay to help (not that he wanted to if his two choices were _whore_ or _husband_ ) when he’d been summoned to BBD’s headquarters like a lapdog. Here he’d been thinking that a level of trust had developed between him and the other members of the team. If only he’d known all the time he’d been giving them all the answers he knew about the layout of the revenant population they’d been keeping secrets behind his back perhaps he wouldn’t have been forthcoming.

But people were just _people_ and you had to expect that alliances were only as good as the men making them.

\--

Howard told him exactly what he’d expected to hear. The repairs they had to do on the bar were almost as expensive as buying the damn thing had been. Part of the supporting structure of the outside wall had been compromised when the grenade detonated and that necessitated a significant number of work hours and more supplies than your average patch job. 

But that was the simple part; walls didn’t usually start shooting at you in the middle of the night.

“David!” he shouted when Howard finished reviewing the list.

David all but fell down the stairs in his haste to arrive. Every step he landed shook fresh dust out of the bullet holes in the wall behind him. (Maybe they could just leave the holes and start telling people it was evidence of another Earp shootout. Like the OK Corral but Purgatory. It wouldn’t even be lying to say Doc Holliday himself had been there.) “Right,” David was saying to himself as he finally came to a stop. He pulled a folded-over sheet of notebook paper out of his pocket. “Right, I did some digging--I went looking--I remember you said _Lars_ and _Chester_ and they had friends but they didn’t have many friends in common. So, I went looking and I remembered.”

Bobo growled.

Across the bar, Hui was picking up bottles and spitting curses at the sort of people that could shoot at perfectly good liquor. He was bitching about lost profits to the tune of sloshing alcohol and breaking glass.

“Are they all dead?” Bobo asked.

“That’s the thing,” David said (oh-so-softly), “I don’t think they were after...uh...Doc. Well, well--Some of them were. Some of them just, you know like _Lars_. They just wanted a…” David looked very uncertain before he whispered, “shot.”

“ _But_ ,” Bobo said.

“ _But_ , I asked around, like you said. I asked around and there’s lots of talking, there’s lots of people saying that you’ve… That you don’t have the right priorities anymore. It ain’t even about your…” He was wincing, whispering, “man? They’re saying that you’ve teamed up with the heir. They’re saying you’re selling them out. And then last night--everyone already knows that the heir was here, and Whiskey Jim’s gone missing and _Lou_ ’s come back.”

No.

No he had _not_. “What?”

David was all but shrinking backward. “It’s just that last week, Cal came in here shaking scared and he said that he saw a girl with that mark--you remember the mark? And then...well you know what happens.”

Of course he knew what happened. There wasn’t a revenant alive that didn’t know what happened when you pissed Lou off. Half the reason Bobo had ever decided to reign in the scattered mass of reincarnated criminals was the safety that came with numbers. Lou couldn’t get to a man when he had to go through an army first. 

(No, Lou could. Lou would go through the whole army, one after another, smiling like a saint the whole fucking time.) 

“He wouldn’t come into my territory,” Bobo said.

“Right,” David agreed, nodding his head as fast as he could. He folded the paper in his hand over and over again. “Right, but…” And he didn’t want to say the next bit, “if he did? If he did come back, we’d have a plan?”

There was only one plan that worked against Lou. It wasn’t a plan so much as the sort of luck that didn’t strike twice. Bobo patted David on the shoulder and it made the man flinch. “You leave that to me.”

\--

There was just enough time between the bar and the sheriff’s office to _finally_ enjoy a smoke. He took his time about walking, letting the thickness of the smoke settle into his lungs like a warm blanket over his ragged nerves. There wasn’t a single part of him that wasn’t singing with exhaustion and his leg was still crying out in objection every time he put weight on it. 

If he had a decent place to lay down, he might have just gone back to sleep. If he’d known the sort of shrieking he was going to walk into, he might have stayed outside and had another smoke. 

There was a skinny stick of a boy with a pinched face and beady eyes, standing one half-step behind and to the side of a woman shouting across the counter at Nedley. The boy had looked up when Doc walked in and his eyes were _following_ him across the room. The last man that had looked at him with that sort of stare had gotten shot in the face.

(And wasn’t it hard to believe that was _only_ yesterday?)

But the woman was yowling like a cat, shouting as if anyone was trying to talk over her. “I want something done about this! I want all of your men on this! Do you know how much this costs?” She was shaking a glass bottle at the placid-faced sheriff trying his best to make it through this unfortunate day.

“Ms. Gardner,” Nedley said slowly.

“Our home was desecrated,” she said, “ _our_ home. This was a hate crime.”

The very tips of the boy’s mouth turned up, just for a moment as he settled more fully into staring at Doc. Like he’d made a choice inside his head about how he wished to proceed. The woman hadn’t taken a breath long enough to notice anyone at all was in the room, but that slimy little bastard standing at her back was reaching out to tug at her shoulder. 

Doc didn’t linger there long enough to see what happened next. Around the corner, he all but ran into Wynonna leaning out of the open door to the illustrious BBD headquarters. She slapped herself in the mouth with her finger, hissing at him to go around her and into the room before they got caught. 

Dolls only just managed to look up from the map he’d spread across the desk in the center of the room. It might have been satisfying to see some reminder of the slap on his face, but there was only the vaguest smirk settled on his mouth. “Wasn’t sure you’d be able to make it in.” He didn’t need to add a single word to that statement, his implication was clear enough, but he motioned at Doc’s body with the end of a pen with a motion as unnecessary as the words, “what with your injury.”

Wynonna had followed him into the room, and her hand slid across his back in a mockery of friendship (or maybe some sort of unspoken declaration of ownership). “I told you he was coming,” she said, but just as quick, “did you hear her out there? That’s Beth Gardner, she thinks she’s hot shit. She’s been there for thirty minutes.” 

“Someone broke into her house,” Dolls said. “Seems like they left all her perfumes and lotions open so they dried out.”

“They _defiled_ her bed linens,” Wynonna added.

“Ate all her favorite cheese and drank the _good_ wine.”

“Left wet towels all over the bathroom, didn’t drain the tub.”

“And something about missing whiskey,” Dolls finished.

And they all knew, or thought they did, exactly who the perpetrators of these acts of violation were. Perhaps they could claim some progress toward adjusting to an idea that they found unfavorable by making light of it. Or maybe it just amused them to imagine Bobo and himself frolicking through a house throwing towels wherever they pleased. 

“There were some plans that I need to be informed of?” Doc asked.

Dolls rolled his eyes. “According to Whiskey Jim, _Lou_ operates out of this area.” He indicated the very large circle that he’d drawn on the map.

It was hard to imagine that Whiskey Jim would have offered that bit of information without some sort of forceful questioning. Doc hadn’t really wondered (before this moment) what became of the man after they’d given him the fight of a lifetime at his underground fight ring. He had too many worries and not enough hours to go off trying to keep track of every revenant he met. “How is Whiskey Jim?”

“Tied up in a scary warehouse,” Wynonna said. (Of course he was.) “So, we just wander into the woods, hope we find a revenant that looks like he can transform into a wolf?”

“We are to believe Lou can transform into an animal?” he repeated. It wasn’t insulting to him (except a little) that he’d been excluded, but it did strike him as absolutely _stupid_ that they wouldn’t have even tried to make full use of the many resources available to them. 

“Last week, a revenant came into the bar looking for Bobo because he said he’d seen a girl getting eaten by a wolf and it had to be Lou. Of course,” Dolls got that amused-and-disapproving look on his face again, “Bobo wasn’t _there_ at the time. The information seems credible and it’s been corroborated by Whiskey Jim.”

“Lou is the name of the revenant that the witch says killed Willa,” Wynonna said, “the way we figure it? He’s got some special hell-given power like moving metal with his mind or turning into a living shadow. We’re going to go in, find him and send him back to hell.”

That sounded exactly like the sort of well-thought-out plan he had come to expect from the pair of them. “Who is _we_?” Doc asked.

“Us,” Dolls said as if that narrowed down the possibilities at all.

“Dolls and me,” Wynonna said. “We should be back before dark, so try not to get into anymore shootouts until then.”

\--

Hui hadn’t been _happy_ to start with, but he had a few choice words to spare for how Henry had walked back into the bar without so much as a hello and helped himself to one of the few surviving bottles of liquor and a glass. Hui wasn’t saying any of those things very loudly, but Bobo was crouching in front of the bar, working on pulling out the bullets lodged into the wood. 

“I can hear you,” he said as he emptied the handful of slugs on the countertop.

Hui was not intimidated; he hadn’t been trying to be _quiet_. Just because Henry couldn’t hear how he was being called lazy and ungrateful didn’t mean that Bobo wasn’t supposed to hear it. If anything, Hui’s raised eyebrow seemed to be indicating he was _meant_ to hear him. 

They’d known one another long enough to understand that sometimes things were too big to face up to all at once. Sometimes you had to spend your effort on the little problems first. Pulling slugs out of the bar wasn’t going to do a damn thing to keep any of them safe if Lou decided to walk his ass back into town. It wasn’t going to stop the next round of revenants that had gotten it into their heads Bobo had gone soft or turned traitor.

But it gave him something he _could_ do. And bitching about Henry getting drunk in the corner gave Hui something _he_ could do. Hui was still mumbling as he pushed his trash can toward the back door.

Henry had set himself up at one of the last surviving tables. He had one hand around a half-full glass and the other digging his knuckles into his thigh. Just going by the look on his face, Henry was having the very same sort of day. “What,” Henry asked when they were the only ones left in the room, “are they saying about me now?”

None of them that had bothered to show up had said anything _outright_ about Henry. (Except Hui, but that wasn’t even personal. That was just good business.) But even the calmest of the revenants, even the ones that Bobo trusted had to be thinking about the cost of keeping Henry around and if he was _really_ worth it.

Willard, and the bar, and Chester screaming in agony across the line and now _Lou_. 

Things had been _easier_ and _funnier_ when they were all laughing at the thought of Wyatt Earp’s best friend being used like a whore. You could stand behind a cruel man because at least when you were on his side, he wasn’t likely to hurt you, but it was something different _now_. 

Cruel men didn’t hand-deliver doughnuts.

“What are yours saying about me?” He leaned across the bar to get a glass for himself while Henry worked out how he wanted to answer that.

“If they have an opinion, I am not worth hearing it _at present_.” He filled Bobo’s glass when he dropped it on the table and kicked the other chair out so there was space to sit. The sun coming through the windows caught across his face in a way that made his eyes terribly bright. 

“The boys think you should contribute more,” he said. (And there was a monster about to creep out of the forest to eat the whole town.)

Henry snorted at that. “I suppose I could see the point in their argument if I have truly been upgraded from your whore to your _husband_.” He dragged that word across his tongue, like it was an insult. The rate they were going, there wasn’t going to be a word in the English language that Henry was willing to be called. “Although I was never known for being particularly handy.”

Bobo leaned back in his chair. “Everyone can sweep, Henry.”

“That is a wildly erroneous assumption.” He wasn’t even smiling when he said it, like he was aiming for a tease and failing himself. “Do you share their opinion? Do I need to make myself more _useful_ to your organization?”

“You’re not part of my _organization_ ,” Bobo tipped his own glass up, let it fill up his mouth and slide down his throat. As he swallowed it, he closed his eyes and followed the burn down to his belly. But Henry was still looking at him when he opened his eyes again. “I’m not your boss. You don’t work for me.”

Henry’s sour face didn’t seem to think that was much of a clarification. “I am relieved to know that I am not considered an employee. It has always been considered somewhat distasteful to engage your own employees in the sort of relationship we have been maintaining.” He refilled his glass like a punctuation. 

This was some sort of relationship they were having. Some sort of shit show where Henry hadn’t figured out he wasn’t supposed to be anything but a way to get back at Wyatt. Maybe that was Bobo’s fault, because he hadn’t _quite_ managed to leave that impression their first time out. 

He had every intention; he’d had every fucking opportunity. He’d had his fists in Henry’s hair with the man on his knees and his cock pushing so deeply into his mouth he could feel his throat closing around it when he choked. 

Henry hadn’t done a damn thing to save himself. He’d sat on his knees, offering up _other delights_ like he had any idea the sort of man Bobo Del Rey really was. Bobo didn’t have any better idea _now_ what Henry was thinking _then_. He didn’t know why Henry didn’t laugh in his face the second time. He didn’t know how the man had ended up here _now_.

But they just kept going, meeting up and _fucking_ and robbing each other of safety. 

\--

Bobo was not in the mood to sit still. He slapped his glass rim-side down on the table so hard it was a surprise the glass didn’t shatter. “What did Wynonna want?”

Doc kicked his chair back farther from the table, since he did not need to pretend to be proper while entertaining company. His thigh was just _aching_ in want of a decent stretch. That wasn’t why he propped his heels on the edge of the table but it was a good enough excuse. “She and her friend _Dolls_ are off on some half-cocked plan. Although I believe the only reason I was invited was so they could inform me that I should attempt to stay out of gunfights.”

“Seems like a stupid thing to say to a man like you,” Bobo said. He didn’t seem to have anything to do with himself. Getting up had only been a good idea when he didn’t want to be sitting down. Now that he was standing, he just didn’t have anything to do with his hands.

“Well,” Doc finished off the glass with a hiss at the softening burn of the liquor warming him up. “She _is_ an Earp. One comes to expect a certain amount of condescension.”

Bobo’s fingers were moving in the air, like playing a piano turned sideways. By the time his pinkie flinched toward his palm a metal slug pulled free from the bar with a crack. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

Half of Wynonna’s problem was just how young she was. Of course, the other half was that Wyatt had saddled his everlasting descendents to a curse that left them growing up in constant fear only to reach an adulthood filled with murder. “How much do you know about how the curse got started?”

“Does it matter?” Bobo crouched down where he’d been when Doc walked in. Those bullets must have been really pissing him off, because he wiggled them loose with violently curved hands. They struck his palm with enough force to rock him on his feet. 

“I guess not,” Doc picked up the bottle again. It was less full than the last time he remembered looking at it. (But he was, theoretically, fuller.) “I am familiar with the _name_ , but I cannot remember if I ever had the pleasure of meeting Robert Svane.” 

It was just as easy to leave the bottle leaning against his chest as it would have been to keep leaning forward to get it. He took a sip of his glass before he looked up to find Bobo still caught in his angry crouch staring at him like he couldn’t understand the words. He caught the bullet he’d been working loose in his fist and pulled himself to standing with one hand flat to the bar.

Hui came back with his oversized plastic trash can dragging across the floor. He said something that was obviously meant for Bobo and when it didn’t seem to be heard, he wisley did not repeat it.

“You can leave,” Bobo said without looking at the man. He set the bullet on the bar with utter civility, flattening his fingers out as if he thought it might fly off on its own. 

(And honestly, sometimes things did start adjusting themselves around Bobo.)

“Did we meet?” Doc asked.

Hui took those last few steps out of the bar like a man about to break out in a run. He pulled the door shut in a way that seemed to imply it wouldn’t open again. 

Bobo wasn’t moving. He was being very still, just looking down at how his hand made a dome over the slug. His face couldn’t quite settle on which expression it was going for, so he ended up almost smiling to himself as his tongue sliced across his barely parted lips. “If you didn’t know who _Robert_ was, how did you know what he did?”

Doc had never been the best dancer in the room, but he understood when he got backed up into a corner all the same. These were not the sorts of things you should talk about when you were drinking and sleep-deprived but it always seemed to be when they happened. Doc had answers to that question and none of them were any good. “There’s no good end to this particular conversation.”

Bobo seemed to agree with him, his smile turned upside down as his hand went flat against the bar. The wood screeched at the force of the metal cutting into it. 

\--

A man should not have to witness being forgotten; that was the sort of thing that was meant to happen when your back was turned. That was the only mercy that death offered you, that you never had to _know_ what you were reduced to long after men stopped visiting your grave.

Bobo didn’t have the benefit of ignorance. He’d crawled out of hell and back into this miserable fucking town he’d died for. He’d had front row seats to how completely Robert Svane had been erased from history; how he’d barely gotten a mention in the article written about his murder. His name wasn’t uttered by the heirs with a single ounce of reverence because Wyatt goddamn Earp hadn’t even seen fit to mention the man he shot in the chest.

Constance had been the only one for _decades_ that remembered Robert. The only one that said his name as it had been _before_. The last bit of memory that a good man had ever had this same face.

All that was left of Robert now was a disintegrating gravestone and a letter that Wyatt Earp had written because he was feeling _kind of sorry_ about that time he fucked him in a rented room. 

“He told you,” Bobo said. He didn’t _ask_ because that would imply that it could be denied. Henry had already all but spelled it out for him, back in the Gardner house, running all his words together, saying things about how he hadn’t _known_. 

How he had been _informed_. 

Henry sighed, like he didn’t want to say _anything_ , but he said: “he always told me.”

What man didn’t go around bragging about his conquests? Oh, and the things that Wyatt must have said about him. But that wasn’t Henry’s fault; he had been perfectly _capable_ of expressing his own opinions. He didn’t need to have his ears filled up with dirty stories of men that just bent over when you pushed them. 

“If you’re just going to sit there and drink, you should do it somewhere else,” Bobo said. He meant _leave_ , but seeing how he’d only just told Henry he wasn’t an employee he couldn’t expect him to _listen_ even when it was good for him. 

“I didn’t ask,” Henry said. He dropped his feet off the table as he leaned forward like a spring unfolding. The liquor bottle scratched on the table top but he didn’t put the glass down. “I didn’t…”

“Shut up,” Bobo growled at him. But Henry wouldn’t. He didn’t have a single ounce of knowing what was good for him. He didn’t know how to leave a bad thing alone. No, he kept coming back _here_. Sitting in the middle of yesterday’s nightmare like there wasn’t another one waiting. Like the whole history of their lives bumping together hadn’t been one horror after another. 

Even now, he was forming up words with his lips, something that would try to take the sting out. Something like apologizing for a dead man without ever saying the words.

But Bobo hadn’t _wanted_ Wyatt’s half-assed apologies. He didn’t want _Henry’s_. “You think I didn’t know why he did it?” 

(No, no, that wasn’t what he wanted to say.)

“You think,” he took a step forward as Henry got to his feet, “I need to be told I was just a _placeholder_ for you? That I was something to hold him over until he got home? That you pissed him off and he went looking for a way to return the favor?”

Henry was shaking his head. He didn’t even put up a fight when Bobo dragged him forward by the shirt front. He was as easy to move as a ragdoll, doing nothing at all but letting go of that liquor glass he’d been hanging onto. It shattered on the floor at their feet in time with Bobo crashing their mouths together.

His mouth was pliant because it was half-drunk and because he’d never (not once) actually _fought back_ when it came to being pulled into kisses he hadn’t asked for. There he was, even now, being held up by the shirt front, finding a way to relax into the grip. 

Henry’s hand curled around the back of his neck; he grabbed Bobo’s arm. He started kissing _back_ now that he’d caught up. A man shouldn’t have so much power in the palms of his hands. He shouldn’t be able to just _accept_ the things that were done to him. 

Henry hissed, all teeth and fingernails, when he hit the table behind them. It scratched along the floor and the glass Bobo had left knocked off the side and shattered. Henry looked sideways at the sound and that made it _easier_ to spin him around. His chest hit the table first, and his elbows next. He groaned in something that couldn’t be considered anything but pain, pushing his hands to the table to lift his face off the damp wood. 

Bobo had to move a step back to pull the almost-empty lube out of his coat pocket. Henry was halfway back to standing in just that span of seconds. His hat had fallen off, and his hair was hanging in his face as he turned to look over his shoulder. There was a question that his mouth was forming around and Bobo did _not_ want to hear him ask it.

He pressed the flat of his hand against Henry’s back, right between his shoulders and shoved him until he was flat again. His legs were already parted, and Bobo’s jeans were loose on his waist. He didn’t even have to unfasten them to pull them over the curve of his ass. 

Henry should have kept fighting, but he went still. He had his hands pushed against the table and his elbows pointed back, but he just _stopped_. His breath was a puff of exhaustion, and he was tipping his chin toward his shoulder so he could see Bobo behind him. He was _watching_ to see how this was going to go. 

He didn’t close his eyes until Bobo’s hand turned into a fist, until he was being pulled back as Bobo pushed forward. Henry closed his eyes as his body opened around Bobo’s cock, and the sound…

Oh _hell_ , the sound he made.

\--

The table was as good as a baseball bat, striking him across the thighs in a ceaseless rhythm. With his eyes closed, he could count the seconds, he could brace himself when he knew it was coming. With his hands pressed against the slick surface he had just enough traction to push back, to soften the blow before it landed. He was concentrating on thinking about nothing, thinking he maybe should have gotten a bit more drunk if this was the sort of fucking they were going to do.

This was the sort of thing that belonged to bar tables. It matched the taste of liquor and wood grain in his mouth. It stung like salt at the edge of his eyes. This was exactly that sort of thing; when you didn’t ask the name of the man doing the fucking and you hid your face to protect your identity.

Oh, John Henry Holliday was no stranger to this sort of fucking, not on either end of it. 

Bobo’s hand on his back went soft _at last_. The hard knobs of his knuckles weren’t digging into his spine anymore. Doc pushed his elbow against the table so he could lift his chest. He was thinking in spinning circles, all the words were getting wrapped up in one another. There wasn’t any way to pick out any one thing from the maelstrom of so many, but he had something like an idea of how this was what Bobo should have done in that rusty tin can. This was what he’d wanted and couldn’t get.

This was his vengeance on Wyatt, _at last_.

And he wished he _hadn’t_ found that thought. 

Oh hell, he wished he hadn’t even tried. He couldn’t _stop_ himself from grabbing for Bobo’s body when he knew it was going to crash back into his. His fingers caught on T-shirt and it slipped away again before he could get a grip. But it came again, and Doc grit his teeth as he tightened his fingers up in that stretchy cotton. 

That wasn’t any better, brought to a standstill. It sure as hell was not better. 

Doc didn’t push Bobo back, he shoved the table out from under him. He moved _forward_ and there was no grip on his clothes pulling him back. There was a shake in his body that he couldn’t give a name to, and something heavy caught up in his face that he didn’t _want_ to. 

There wasn’t more than three feet between them, just far enough he could stretch out his arm with a finger half pointed at Bobo’s chest. “That’s enough,” Doc said and he almost didn’t know the sound of his own voice. 

“Henry--”

“No,” he said. His face was coated in sweat, and liquor, and… He pushed his hair out of his face, thinking he probably should have pulled his pants up. They weren’t barely low enough to count as being _down_. You didn’t need so much space when a little got you what you wanted. And if that was how _Wyatt_ treated people, he deserved every single ounce of hatred he got. “Now,” he motioned at the table to the side, “if that’s…”

No. No that wasn’t what he wanted to say.

Goddamn Bobo’s stupid face, looking as close to crying as he’d ever seen any man. Like he had a _right_. 

“I,” he said when he had a voice that would hold him, “am _not_ Wyatt. I sure _as hell_ never told him to write those fucking letters. I _never_ sent him out to do what he did. I didn’t even _know_ what he was out there doing until he told me. And I _never_ asked.” 

Bobo was going to say _something_. His mouth was forming around words like _I’m sorry_ and that was fine if Doc could have even _heard_ them. 

“You want me bent across a table because that’s what you _want_ , because that’s how you want _me_ , you just tell me. But,” and his voice cracked there, “if you can’t bury Wyatt, he is going to bury us.”

\--

Some part of him had always wondered what he had looked like to Wyatt. What sort of sight he had been pushed flat against that table by the window. Long after hell had burned out the pathetic little worm that Robert was, it was a question he couldn’t shake. Every single Earp heir had looked at him the way Wyatt had in those first terrible seconds after, when their eyes met before their clothes were fixed. Like he was a disgusting mistake.

But Henry was nothing like Robert, because he hadn’t given in for the vague hope of being something _important_. He wasn’t standing in the bar now, shaking mad, because he was willing to be used by anyone that might make him feel better about himself. 

Bobo couldn’t bury Wyatt because he’d died a very long way from where they stood. Because all his life was tied up in the carelessness of that man. His whole life was reduced to a triangle and endless cycle of captivity and _hell_. 

The first _good_ thing that had happened to him was this stupid man _waiting_ for him to do anything to make a bad thing better. Bobo couldn’t make it better; he couldn’t change a damn thing he’d already done. He couldn’t even promise it wouldn’t happen again.

Because they’d pissed off everyone from the monster in the woods to Wynonna Earp and her possessive little palm always finding reasons to touch Henry now. They were the center of a storm that was going to _destroy_ them. 

Bobo didn’t even need any help; because he didn’t have a single fucking clue what he was supposed to say _now_. Robert was never given the opportunity to have a lover that _cared_. Bobo was never afforded the security of loving anything.

Henry must have been tired of waiting, because his arms dropped by his sides. His face wasn’t hoping for anything anymore, he was gritting his teeth and pulling the holster cinched at his waist loose. “Fine,” he hissed as he tossed it across the table. He took two steps and shoved Bobo so hard he fell back into the bar. “Finish what you started.”

“ _Henry_ ,” he said.

But Henry hooked a foot around the back of his knees and pulled. They both fell over. Bobo hit a barstool and Henry landed on his knees with a snarl that could have been all anger or all pain. He had one hand against the bar behind them and other pushing down the zipper of his jeans. 

Bobo wrapped his hands around Henry’s arms, just above the elbow where they were tensed up with effort. “Henry,” he growled through his clenched teeth. He should have known better than trying to stop the man once he’d gotten an idea in his head. It didn’t matter how hard Bobo held onto his arms, he wasn’t going to _quit_. 

Henry was still fighting when Bobo rolled them. He was wiggling like he could kick his jeans off while he was still wearing his boots, flat on his back by the bar. Both of his hands were digging into Bobo’s skin, pushing back against him and pulling him closer all at once. 

“Stop it,” Bobo growled at him.

Every action had a consequence, and Bobo hadn’t been worried about that _before_. He couldn’t have imagined (or he could have. Might have thought this was what he wanted). But Henry was panting and red faced, with his arms pinned at his sides and his legs lurching up to wrap around Bobo’s body. “Finish what you started,” he said again, “at least make it worth my time.”

This was what Bobo had done. And it hadn’t even been about _Henry_. It had _never_ been about Henry. It wasn’t about Robert in a tobacco filled bar, when Henry was a dying man coughing up blood. It wasn’t about Henry as that long thread slid out of his fingers and damned them both to end up here. 

It had _always_ been about Wyatt. Bury Wyatt, Henry had said, or he will bury _us_.

Because at least one of them had made a choice; one of them had seen the obvious and been man enough to call it what it was. Bobo ducked his head so it was pressed against Henry’s struggling chest. He leaned his weight back on his knees, folded down so he couldn’t be pulled. Henry’s legs were still around his back, his heels were digging in to get the leverage to arch his body. 

“I’m sorry,” Bobo said. He wasn’t hiding those words in the folds of Henry’s shirt. He wasn’t trying to hide from having to look him in the face. He moved his hands off Henry’s arms but they didn’t grab at him. 

No, Henry went still under him. 

\--

Bobo’s whole body got hot as a fire sometimes. Like just now, with his face pressed against Doc’s chest and his body like a blanket kneeling over him. His skin was a furnace burning beneath his clothes. That heat offered no safety. A fire like that was all hunger, with no heart and no conscience. 

No man that knew enough to be saying anything on the subject could say that Bobo Del Rey lacked either a heart or a conscience. You didn’t find yourself burning through your skin, caught up in something so terrible you couldn’t contain it, if you didn’t have a heart. 

Just because you had a heart didn’t know you knew what to do with it. 

Doc ran his hand up the length of Bobo’s back, from his ribs to his neck. His hand caught in the curve of his neck to pull him up. There was no worth in apologies whispered into a man’s clothes. They were like flowery threats written up like apologies, sent with the mail. 

“You fucking idiot,” he said with his hand cupped around Bobo’s pink face. His thumb ran across the rise of his cheekbone, just under his water-bright eyes. Doc was _tired_ ; he was holding onto an idea that they could make it through if they just had enough patience. He’d seen how far this idiot of a man was willing to go to protect them both. It was just this that failed him, these little moments when words were better than actions. “Someone should have shown you how this works.” 

“I’m sorry,” Bobo said again. He’d meant it the first time and he meant it second. It was like agony on his face; that ruthless heat soaking through his clothes and baking Doc alive. He was doing his best to keep all his touches superficial, like he didn’t want to settle too close. Maybe he meant it like respect, but it felt like a yawning cavern opening up between them. “Come on, let me find you somewhere with a real bed.” And, just so there was no confusion, “so you can sleep.”

“That is one of your better ideas,” he agreed. It wasn’t his _best_ , but it was an attempt at something that didn’t seem to come naturally to him.

\--

Henry had done a very convincing job of being awake from the bar to the hotel room. He’d smiled at the nice girl at the front desk that gave them the keys, and sauntered his way down the hall to the room. He didn’t give up on the pretense of keeping his eyes open until the door was closed. 

Bobo had barely dropped the key on the dresser opposite the bed before Henry had managed to shed his coat, boots, socks, guns, hat, and long sleeve shirt. He was wearing nothing Bobo’s jeans and a skin-tight undershirt, throwing back the expertly made blankets to collapse on the bed. For a moment he just laid there, face down like a flattened octopus with his face pressed into a pillow and no sign that he hadn’t just fallen asleep that way. 

When he moved, it was just to inch to one side of the bed. He rolled half onto his side like that left any sort of room at all on the bed. There was no verbal invitation but Henry watched him hesitate by the TV until Bobo sighed and shrugged his coat off. Henry smiled with his face half covered in a pillow and pulled the blanket up over his shoulders. 

Bobo didn’t like sleeping in jeans. He didn’t like sleeping in shirts. He didn’t like _sleeping_ much at all, and hell had stripped most of the need out of him. By the time he’d stripped down, Henry was half asleep, breathing softly into the pillow with his fingers curled by his face. It almost seemed _rude_ to slide into the empty space at his side, like the effort would jostle him awake again. But Henry hummed to himself as he opened his eyes just a sliver to be sure Bobo was still there.

The sheets were cool and _soft_. The mattress was full enough to sink into. Henry threw the blanket over him as soon as he’d laid down, like he was trying to trap the heat. The man was taking up his own space, laying there like he had any plans to keep his limbs to himself. As soon as he was asleep he’d start spreading out, inching his arms and legs across the bed in some attempt to cover the whole thing at once. 

It didn’t feel like he had any right to be here, but he was willing to be selfish (just a little while longer) if it meant Henry would sigh himself to sleep as soon as Bobo’s hand rested on his back.

\--

There was no good cure for awkwardness. It was like a bit of syrup that wouldn’t wash off, making everything stick to you when you didn’t want it. 

Doc had fallen asleep with a warm hand resting on his back and the glowing heat of Bobo trapped beneath the blankets with him. It had been daylight around the edges of the dark curtains and he had some thought that it was early afternoon. But he woke up to the cooling heat of a recently-abandoned space on the bed next to him and the flicker of a lamp being turned on. 

Bobo standing across the room still wearing nothing but his underwear, looking annoyed as hell about being awake. His hair was hanging everywhere but how it was usually brushed. He had two white cardboard boxes (full of food, it smelled like) balanced in one hand. “Sorry,” he said when Doc rolled over to look at him. “I… Food,” he held up the boxes.

The hotel was not spacious enough to include a table for eating at. There was only a single chair tucked into the corner and it did not look big enough for two. Doc was not the sort of man that liked the idea of eating in bed but when faced with no other alternatives it would simply have to do. “What have you gotten us to eat?”

Bobo dragged the chair over before he set the boxes on the space he’d left empty on the bed. Whatever guilt had been inspired him to fresh levels of stupidity in the afternoon was making him slow and reluctant now. “Pizza,” he answered at last. “One’s cheese, one’s bacon.”

Doc had to pull his jeans back up to his waist before he could sit up properly on the bed. The headboard gave a sad wheeze when he leaned against it. “You do know how to treat a man. A nice room and a hot meal?”

“You’ve got really shitty standards,” Bobo said. He flipped the lid open and the smell of hot cheese and crisped bacon became so strong that Doc’s stomach was rolling. It all but yowled in protest at being so consistently neglected. Bobo waved his hand to indicate Doc should choose his slice first.

Nothing good ever came from being too shy to take what you wanted. The pizza was delicious hot. The crust was smooth and thin, layered with sauce and what felt like a mountain of perfectly melted cheese generously sprinkled with crushed bacon. It was covered in grease but a little bit of grease never hurt anyone at all. He ate through half the slice without sparing a single second to worry over Bobo’s guilt. 

“ _You_ should tell me about Robert,” Doc said. He didn’t want to _dwell_ on the afternoon’s events. He just wanted to be here, for a moment, fully rested and gorging himself on something greasy and gross. 

Bobo leaned back into the chair with his barely touched slice of pizza half-hanging out of his hand. “Why? Robert’s dead.”

“Then tell me how he died. How I heard it from Wyatt, you were a trusted confidante.”

“Because he fucked me?” Bobo asked. It was the very first time he’d said it outloud (at least to Doc) without skirting around the facts. His lip curled up as he said it like he’d annoyed himself. “Robert Svane wanted to be a _trusted confidante_. He was just too stupid to know the difference between being an equal and being a follower. He would have done _anything_ for Wyatt.”

Since this seemed like the sort of thing that was going to take them a _long_ while to work around, Doc pulled a second slice of pizza out of the box. “I could be convinced to part with some unflattering information about Wyatt that may help you to see him in the very unfortunately human light in which he should be remembered. I find that removing the mysticism of our mutual friend does help you when you find yourself elevating him to undeserved heights.”

“I thought we were burying Wyatt.”

Oh, they were going to put him six feet in the ground for _good_. “You cannot bury a man you have placed on a pedestal. We would all be better served to remember that long before he was a glorious lawman, he was nothing but a horse thief.”

Bobo snorted. “I knew Purgatory better than Wyatt did. I went with him to help him take care of Sheriff Clootie.”

“While Wyatt’s general hygiene was average among his peers, he had an exceptionally strong odor in his nether regions that made certain activities impossible for any man still in possession of their sense of smell or taste.”

“Clootie was a demon,” Bobo said (with a smile pulling at the edges of his mouth). “Of course, Wyatt wouldn’t _believe_ that no matter how many people told him. Since he didn’t believe in things like demons, he definitely couldn’t believe in curses. I believed in it; I tried to keep him safe.”

Doc found himself with very greasy fingers and no real place to wipe them except his jeans. Considering the firefight of the night before, they were already lacking in cleanliness so it didn’t make them any significantly less pleasant to wear. “Wyatt slobbered like a dog when he was drunk.”

“I got in the way,” Bobo said softly. “I knew Clootie was a demon and I knew about the curse, but I got in the way. Clootie must have thought that Wyatt wouldn’t shoot an innocent man just to kill him.”

Well, Wyatt did have that look about him. You were willing to believe he was just about the purest thing that ever lived. “Well,” he said, “as I have said, despite his many, _many_ attempts to convince me of his skill on the matter, Wyatt did not have the pleasure of fucking me. This was, _primarily_ , because the man had no rhythm at all. In fact, it was often necessary to hold him still so as to keep him from ruining _my_ rhythm.”

Bobo laughed like he couldn’t help it. It started as a tickle in his gut and it burst out of his mouth in a gracelessly loud sound. He dropped that pizza he’d been holding without eating and didn’t even seem to care about it. “I knew that one,” he said.

“Smaller dick too,” Doc said.

“Small, smelly and bad?” Bobo said. 

Doc shrugged. “I would not tell a lie about such an important thing. It was practically an act of charity on my part, attempting to educate the poor man on the matter of sex.”

The smile was sliding right off Bobo’s face as he shook his head. He had to take a breath to say, “I told Wyatt to shoot me. If he hadn’t done it, Clootie would have gotten away. He would have known we were looking for him, who knows if we would have ever found him again.”

And Wyatt had been enough of an asshole to do it. Of course, men like Wyatt only believed in the one God but it didn’t make it any _better_ to think that Wyatt had just assumed Robert would die.

“The last time I saw Wyatt he told me I was a selfish coward for not wanting to die. He said I was a memory he wished to forget.”

Bobo looked so _sad_ , but he said, “I thought his mustache was ugly.”

\--

Henry didn’t beckon him closer, but the way he flipped shut the lid on the pizza and dropped both boxes off the side of the bed seemed to be an invitation. He inched over to make extra space for Bobo at the edge but not so far away he was retreating. Once he was sure that Bobo was going to fill up the space he left, he swiped his hair away from his face to add:

“It also tickled a man in a place he should not be tickled.”

They were sharing a stupid smile because it was _ridiculous_. Because they’d made a mockery of a modern hero. All the world could remember him however they wanted, but John Henry Holliday had known his best out of everyone that ever lived. Here he was, giving up secrets like digging a grave, all but standing on rooftops to shout how he couldn’t be gotten rid of.

Henry could be driven away; he just didn’t know that yet.

Still, Bobo kissed him how he should have at the bar. He kissed him as sweet as all of Henry’s _trying_. And it had been a good deal of trying; trying to be kind. Trying to be patient. Trying to understand. 

His thumb scratched across the overgrown stubble covering Henry’s cheeks. His hand was forming to the shape of his jaw, feeling how his pulse jumped at the touch. Bobo had damaged something, and he knew it, because Henry didn’t relax into this kiss. He was leaning on his own elbow, holding himself up while he rested a hand on Bobo’s chest. 

He didn’t sigh into the wet press of their mouths; he didn’t open his mouth with ease and eagerness. Henry’s leg twitched but he didn’t hook it over Bobo’s to pull him closer. No, he was feeling this out, seeing where it was going to go. 

That’s what he’d done.

Bobo pushed their foreheads together as he pulled out of the kiss. His hand flattened over the rise of Henry’s collarbones. His heart hadn’t beat so fast in _ages_ ; he couldn’t even remember the last time he felt this particular sort of anxiety. This twisting thing in his gut that felt like bravery and fear all wrapped up together. He didn’t open his eyes when he said, “I’m not here because of Wyatt. I don’t want you for any reason other than you being you.”

Henry pushed their foreheads together harder. His whole body was moving now, rolling up to his knees so he could put one leg across Bobo’s lap and settle there. His hands were framing Bobo’s face, his fingers spread out across his cheek and pressing just under his jaw. “Do not _ever_ ,” Henry said as low as a rattling snake, “try to use me like you did today. Not _ever_ again. I will hang you upside down and bleed you like a pig.”

Bobo was holding onto his bent back with both hands. “I won’t.”

For a minute, there was no going forward and no going back. There was only that moment when their faces were so close they were all but kissing noses together and Henry’s hands were hard and almost hurtful around his face. He was looking for honesty, and he must have found it because he kissed Bobo again.

It was not full of sweetness, but it felt something like forgiveness.

Henry didn’t settle into his lap but grab the headboard with one hand to keep himself steady on his knees. There wasn’t much of a difference in their heights except for when they ended up like this, but Henry was leaning over him just to make his head tip back. There was a thumb running down the front of his throat, pushing just hard enough to feel dangerous. 

Bobo pulled at his back, dug the tips of his fingers into the long-lean muscles flexing with the motion of the kiss. He couldn’t have imagined any body that felt better under his hands; he couldn’t have dreamed up someone that he’d enjoy touching more than he liked this. Henry was built slim, made of useful muscle, stretched out across his bones. His hands had inched upward but Henry shrugged his hands off before they got to his shoulders. 

As soon as Bobo’s hands dropped to his waist, Henry leaned back to pull his undershirt over his head and drop it to the side. His mouth was pinked around the edges, his eyes were barely open. That hand at the base of Bobo’s throat was doing all the thinking as it slid back up to push at his chin. Henry didn’t say a word, but shifted his knees back so he could duck low enough to suck toothy kisses into Bobo’s skin. 

“I assume you have lubricant in one of your pockets?” Henry was biting that question into his neck, tracing the letters all the way down his chest. Bobo wasn’t supposed to touch him anywhere but low-low on his naked back but Henry could slid the fullness of his palm across Bobo’s cock like he owned it. 

“Yes,” he said. 

Henry leaned back on his knees, with that hand still pushing at Bobo’s shoulder and the one between them pushing his underwear out of the way. He was still just _looking_ at him like he hadn’t fully made up his mind. 

“We don’t have to,” Bobo said, “if you...don’t want to.”

\--

Just so long as they were all aware that Doc never had to do a damn thing he didn’t want to do. As long as _Bobo_ understood that he had been given _permission_ and that it wasn’t owed to him. They weren’t in the habit of taking their clothes off to see which one of them could bully the other most effectively. 

Some sex was just like that.

But _this_ was not. Doc tightened his grip around Bobo’s cock, felt how it made his whole body startle, how he hadn’t _expected_ that sort of an answer. His hands had been resting loosely on Doc’s waist, waiting for some kind of permission to try touching him again, but Bobo dropped one down to grab at Doc’s wrist. He wasn’t trying to _stop_ him, but following along with the slow drag up and down again. 

They were working together and working against one another all at once. Doc was stroking him to make him hard, to feel how it shivered through his body. He wanted to watch him go pink with that pleasure; to see how he squirmed when he was caught in a single place with nothing to do but take it. 

And Bobo--

Well, Bobo must not have wanted to be made a fool of. That was one of those things you learned about love. It _always_ made a fool of you. Doc walked a half-step closer on his knees, ducked his head so their foreheads were kissing again. “You can take it,” he said, “just a little bit longer.”

Bobo nodded his head without making a sound louder than a gust of breath. His hand dropped away from Doc’s wrist, pressed against his bent thigh instead. His tensed up belly relaxed into a mountain of little rolls. “Yeah,” he said when Doc started stroking him again. 

The cock in his hand hadn’t even been fully hard when he started. All the troubles they _did_ have, he couldn’t swear they’d ever had a problem getting aroused over the thoughts of what they could do to one another. Everything was different when you turned it a little to left. Bobo liked having the upper hand; it must have felt just like safety when all his life was caught up in the half-assed lie that he was a great and terrible man. You spent enough time pretending to be something and you forgot how to stop.

Doc pulled his hand away when the slide went dry, he held his palm out flat just under Bobo’s open mouth. As close as they were, he got to watch the realization run through the man’s body from the pink at the edge of his ears to the quiver in his core. Bobo’s hand caught his wrist again, his fingers spread across the back of Doc’s hand to hold it still as he lapped his tongue along the length of it from the heel of his hand to the tips of his fingers. 

His mouth was pure wet sin where his lips closed around Doc’s fingers and sucked on them for good measure. His eyes closed when he did it as he rumbled a happy little sound low-low in his throat. 

This was a hell of a thing they were doing to each other. Doc’s hand was sloppy wet when he closed it around Bobo’s dick again. That hand that had been lazily waiting for instruction tightened on his hip. That thumb pushed into the bone like a bruise as Bobo’s fingers edged under the gaping waistband of his jeans. 

The next sound he made was a moan to the beat of his hips pushing up into the lazy, slip-slide of Doc’s hand. He was turning petal pink all along his collarbones, wiggling where he was sitting because it felt _good_. Because it reminded him of all the good ways Doc’s body made him feel. 

It was just a hand, but that could lead to a mouth. And Bobo wriggled and wiggled and squirmed like a fish on land when you put your mouth on his leaking cock. He was blunt fingers and clenching thighs when you sucked him until he was spent. Laid out on the bed in the aftermath, he was a beautiful sweat-soaked sight made of pastel colors and fierce kisses.

Right now, it was just his hand, and Bobo’s urgent gasps. It was his hand pushing farther down into Doc’s jeans, aiming to get a handful of his ass because it felt _good_. Sometimes, all you needed to get there was knowing who you had your hands on. All bodies were made of the same things: just blood, skin, muscle and bone. You started off thinking it didn't matter whose tits you were squeezing until all of a sudden you were daydreaming about the perfect pair.

“Henry,” Bobo growled, because he was getting hotter and _wetter_ and he didn’t want to come like this

“I cannot answer a question you do not ask,” Doc whispered back. 

Bobo’s voice was the edge of something like agony, he said, “can I fuck you?”

Doc kissed him, how he might have kissed him that morning. How he would have kissed him the night before. Bobo pulled him forward by the ass, pushing back into the kiss with more confidence and not a single bit of arrogance. “Yes,” he said, “but don’t pull on my legs.”

“On your back?” Bobo was _asking_ but he was also rolling them over. Nodding was as good as saying anything, and that left his mouth available to get kissed again. . 

\--

The letter had fallen out of his pocket when he picked up his jeans to shake them out. He’d had some intention to put his clothes back on. What with all the enemies he’d been making lately, being naked was nothing but being stupid. But the letter was a crushed up ball of paper on the floor, scattered with just enough of Wyatt’s handwriting that it was immediately recognizable.

Robert had read the letter, because he’d found it in Wyatt’s hotel room. It wasn’t like he was snooping when it had _his_ name on it. Wyatt hadn’t ever actually sent it to him and seeing how it ended up in Ward Earp’s fumbling fat fingers, it seemed like he’d decided it wasn’t worth his time. 

Then again, there was no need to go around apologizing to a dead man.

Henry drew in a hell of a long breath, stretching his limbs along the dirty sheets as he came back into full consciousness. He took his time about getting his eyes open, and even once he managed it, they seemed like they were going to close again. He only just managed to find Bobo standing at the foot of the bed, “I am about sick of seeing that thing.”

That made two of them. Bobo tossed his jeans across the end of the bed so he could dig the lighter out of the pocket. “We can’t bury a dead man,” he said. 

The hotel room was as unimpressive as Purgatory as a whole. It didn’t even have so much as a decorative bowl, but it had a dingy black trash can by the dresser. He kicked it over toward the bed as Henry rolled onto this stomach so he was looking over the edge of the mattress.

“Should we say a few words?” Henry asked.

“Fuck you?” Bobo asked. He sat in the chair by the bed with the trashcan between his feet and the letter spread out in his hand. Robert had been so utterly fucked over by Wyatt, and he hadn’t even had the balls to be pissed about it. Nothing good came out of hell, but being able to be _angry_ still felt like a revelation every single time he thought of Wyatt goddamn Earp. 

“Good riddance.” 

The lighter started with a muffled flick. The fire caught on the paper in an instant. As old as it was, as dry as it was, it burned all at once. He dropped when the flames licked up the sides of his hand, but it was all but gone before it even hit the bottom of the trashcan. There was nothing left but ash and the smell of dust and old regret.

“You really think Wynonna will work with me?”

Henry scratched at his unruly hair before he said, “yes. Although you will need to be a bit more forthcoming about your knowledge of the events that led to this curse.”

Bobo sighed, “it seems that word has gotten around that I’ve already decided to team up with her,” (Henry made a face like he _had_ already decided that), “and I’m no longer _fit_ to lead the revenants. If Wynonna thought they were bad under my guidance, she has no idea what’s coming for her.”

“Well, she will when you tell her. It is in the nature of allies to share all relevant information.” He didn’t seem very _concerned_ about it. Maybe that was just the person Henry was; he just didn’t let a little thing like all out warfare with demons from hell bother him. “I assume,” he did, at least, pull himself up to lean against the headboard. He pointed at the pizza boxes resting on the floor, “they will not only be coming after Wynonna.”

“They might not even be coming after her first,” Bobo said. She was a problem, but she wasn’t a _personal_ problem that most of them were too worried about. Bobo was trying to warn the man that their lives were in danger, and Henry wouldn’t stop pointing at the stupid pizza box until Bobo handed it to him. “I’m telling you I don’t know how many men are coming to kill you.”

“They are coming to _try_ to kill me,” Henry corrected. He flipped open the box and picked up a slice of the room-temperature pizza. “As you may recall, given my reputation, there was almost always at least one man that was on his way to try to kill me. I did not become so well known for being the quickest draw and the sharpest eye because I was not afforded the chance to perfect these skills. Men are _always_ trying to kill me. The key in staying alive is an adequate supply of bullets and a worthy ally. I have both.”

“And pizza,” Bobo said. 

“Yes.”


End file.
